Free Republic

This is the moment a lightning bolt appears to strike the Statue of Liberty in New York. New York photographer Jay Fine had spent the night braving the storm in Battery Park City, Manhattan, in a bid to get the perfect picture. Jay spent nearly two hours poised with his camera and took more than 80 shots before striking lucky with this particular bolt of lightning at 8.45pm on 22 September. He said he had been waiting 40 years to get the picture. To capture the shots Jay used a Nikon D300s with 60mm f/2.8 lens on the following...

LONDON (AFP) – Friday the 13th proved suitably unlucky for one 13 year-old boy who was struck by lightning before being taken to hospital -- at 13:13 on the dreaded date. The boy, who has not been named, was treated for a minor burn after being hit along with two others at an air show in Suffolk, eastern England, a spokeswoman said. ... Clarke added that two other people were treated for injuries from lightning burns in the space of twenty minutes, and that all three people were holding umbrellas at the time which "acts as a conductor for electricity."...

DENVER, - A man who was struck by lightning while hiking the highest summit in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park said he is eager to return. Brandon Baker, 31, of Princeton, Minn., said he was atop the 14,259-foot summit of Longs Peak when a storm rolled in Wednesday and he lost consciousness shortly after spotting lightning bolts, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported Friday. "The next thing I knew, I woke up the next morning," Baker said. Baker said he woke up feeling sore and was met on the way down by a camper who came to find him when he did...

A teenager was recovering from a lightning strike that happened while he stood inside his own garage on Wednesday afternoon. Stephon Owens, 15, was just about to push a button on the garage door opener when a surge of electricity shot through the house on Bell Meade drive in Douglas County, his parents told Channel 2 Action News reporter Eric Philips. “They came in here to put the basketball hoop together and ….and that’s when it went through his arm,” said Sabrina Bryan, Owens' mother. The teenager and his father were working to assemble a basketball net when the storm...

A fifth-grade Prosper math teacher whose truck was struck by lightning this weekend said he's going to turn it into a lesson plan. The shock tore up a stretch of road along the Dallas North Tollway near U.S. 380. “We’re going to do the odds on this," said Russell Babb. "I got to figure out with the kids, what the odds are of your teacher getting struck by lightning." Babb, who was driving to meet his brother for lunch, said it sounded like a bomb. Concrete flew everywhere, he said. “It chopped up the cement like a sledgehammer,” he said....

This is the extraordinary moment a photographer captured bolts of lightning striking not one, but two Chicago landmarks at the same time. Electricity rushed down the lightning rods atop the The Willis Tower and the Trump Tower at the exact same instant last night. Seen through the rain from the Hancock Tower, the strikes lit up the sky around. (Great photos.)

My coworkers and I took a political test with 100 questions, 10 in 10 categories. I was by far the most conservative. 91/100. Most of my liberal coworkers got between 10/100 and 30/100. Only a couple others got above 50/100. Ugh. The breakdown. life - 10/10 abortion is wrong guns - 10/10 support no restriction on gun ownership marriage - 10/10 man and woman only, homosexuality is wrong healthcare - 10/10 repeal Obamacare and we need tort reform. immigration - 2/10 since I oppose HB1070. We need the workers. The McCain path to citizenship I support. environment - 10/10 too...

Richard Butler was about to ask Bethany Lott to marry him last weekend when the cruelest hand of nature interrupted. They were at the top of North Carolina's Max Patch Bald , a 4,600-foot mountain on the Tennessee border. Before the ring was out of his hand, the couple was struck by lightning. Lott, 25, was instantly killed and Butler, 30, was knocked down. "She was probably five feet in front of me, so given the incline, she was a good bit higher than me, but it jumped to me," Butler told the Ashville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times. "I was spun...

KNOXVILLE (WATE) - A Knoxville man was minutes from proposing to his girlfriend on a hike in Western North Carolina Friday when she was struck and killed by lightning. "Everything went black. I was spun 180 degrees, thrown several feet back. My legs turned to jelly. My shoes were smoking and the bottom of my feet felt like they were on fire," Richard Butler said. For a moment, he said he thought he was the only one hit by the bolt of lightning. However, it was his girlfriend Bethany Lott, 25, who took the direct hit. She was hiking just...

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) -- A lightning strike in Yellowstone National Park injured nine people waiting to see Old Faithful geyser erupt. One man hit by the bolt on Tuesday was hospitalized.

UPDATE: President Barack Obama's Memorial Day address at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood was just getting started when lightning and heavy, gusting rains stopped the proceedings. The president, umbrella in hand, encouraged spectators to get to a safe place to ride out the storm and said he would hold off the ceremony because he didn't want anyone to get hurt. "Excuse me, everybody listen up," Obama told the crowd. "We are a little bit concerned about lightning. This may not be safe. I know that all of you are here to commemorate the fallen. ... What we'd like to...

This one was pretty obvious, but I'll do something different. If you want to see spectacular ash clouds lit with incandescence and laced with lightning, go to the link at the top. For the feature today, I thought I'd go in a different direction; the aftermath of the jokulhlaup. Here's a video up close of both the eruption and the meltwater pulse. It's got a soft soundtrack. Video 1 Now, as a bonus, if you haven't seen this video, you should. Clicking the link should load it in Windows Video Player; (it's a WMV file). I don't know how to...

Lightning makes mushrooms more plentiful, according to ongoing research that offers a solid scientific basis for Japanese farming lore. For generations, Japanese farmers have welcomed storms over their fields based on the belief that lightning strikes provoke plentiful harvests of mushrooms, which are staples of Japanese cuisine. Currently, mushroom demand is so high that dealers are increasingly turning to foreign suppliers. Japan imports about 50,000 tons of mushrooms a year, mainly from China and South Korea. As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced...

The first Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] F-35B Lightning II short takeoff, vertical landing (STOVL) stealth fighter demonstrated the capability to hover today during a test flight at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. The flight was a significant test mission leading up to the aircraft’s first vertical landing. It confirmed predictions of the jet’s vertical thrust, stability and control in hovering flight. Today’s flight began with a conventional takeoff before F-35 lead STOVL Pilot Graham Tomlinson initiated conversion to STOVL mode at 200 knots airspeed. He then slowed the aircraft to 60 knots and flew a decelerating approach to a...

AN AIRCRAFT that crashed minutes after taking off in a thunderstorm, killing all 90 people on board, is thought to have been struck by lightning. The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 had just left Beirut in Lebanon for the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa when it burst into a "ball of fire" and plunged into the Mediterranean. There were two Britons among the 83 passengers on board. One of them was named as haulage firm owner Afif Krisht, 56, who had dual British-Lebanese nationality, and whose former wife lives in Plymouth. Flight ET-409 crashed into the sea two miles offshore. It disappeared...

BEIRUT, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Rescue workers have located the crash site of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that went down just off the Lebanese coast on Monday, Lebanon's Transport Minister Ghazi al-Aridi said. "(The crash) site has been identified three-and-a-half km (two miles) west of the (coastal) village of Na'ameh," Aridi told reporters at Beirut international airport. He said search and rescue operations were under way but refused to give any further details. He also said it was too early to say what caused the crash but confirmed the plane took off from Beirut international airport in stormy weather

VARIOUS SIZES HERE

Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on EarthWashington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s forthcoming autobiography has been at the top of the Amazon book charts for weeks, and it hasn’t even been released yet. At least in the eyes of the political Left, she is now perhaps America’s most visible national Republican. But new Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveying finds Palin losing handily in face-to-face march-ups with her two likeliest challengers for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Among likely Republican primary voters, Palin now trails former Arkansas governor-turned-Fox-TV-host Mike Huckabee by 20 points – 55% to 35%. When her opponent is ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Palin loses by...

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. A freak bolt of lightning struck a 56-year-old cyclist in Englewood, Colo., even though no electrical storms were reported in the area, authorities say. Perry Schellpfeffer, an Englewood police spokesman, told The Denver Post the unidentified victim was hit by the lightning Wednesday afternoon. His injuries were not considered life-threatening. "There were some clouds and it was thundering a little, but there wasn't any kind of lightning storm," Schellpfeffer said. Among U.S. states, Colorado tied Florida for the most deaths from lightning strikes in 2008, when each had four. In 2006, each state had eight lightning-related deaths, the...